Americans by the thousands who never heard of Saul Alinsky have now read his book Rules for Radicals. Suddenly the scales fall from our eyes and we see how a determined group of ultra radicals organized their way to power.

At last we've been roused from our media-induced trance and understand the radical plan to remake America before the next election. We were napping while the forces of Mordor searched for Sauron. We were watching the game while the hijackers were aiming their Acorn powered SEIU financed ship at the twin houses of Congress. We were concentrating on making a living and raising our families while the progressive paymasters, casino capitalists and greed merchants turned Pleasantville into Potterville. We've watched in amazement as we tighten our belts and Washington adds a few more notches.

Feverishly we're trying to rearm after the Pearl Harbor of November 2008. The tide of battle is rushing over us like a torrent. Every day new regulations, more debt and radical legislation are being spun over America like threads over Gulliver. The Tea Party Patriots and born-again community organizers of the right believe it is not too late to mount a D-Day at the ballot box on November 2010. The talking-heads tell us this is a Kamikaze Congress ready to go down in flames. Don't believe it. They know it's now or never. Impose their centrally-planned collectivist clap-trap over the Land of the Free before Americans get a chance to vote them out of the Home of the Brave.

I believe the Obama-Reid-Pelosi regime sells this Charge of the Blight Brigade to the backbenchers by assuring them their Acorn-Steal-the Vote and Immigration-import-a-Voter strategy will assure them of everlasting electoral life. They're saying though it may be the Endless Great Recession for the rest of us it's Happy Days are Here Again for them. These Kamikazes plan to live to fly another day. But then again, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Don't despair. Keep the faith. We shall overcome!

That's the question Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) is asking as he threatens next month to lead a second attempt to strip the Harlem Democrat of his powerful post as Ways and Means Committee chairman.

"Every tax attorney in the country will tell you that if a normal taxpayer committed the violations of Chairman Rangel, they would be assessed serious penalties and interest, if not charged with criminal tax evasion," Carter said. "This is about defending the rule of law itself."

Carter led the charge but failed to oust Rangel in October. The House Ethics Committee began its probe of Rangel's alleged ethics breaches in September 2008 after The Post reported he had not disclosed income from a Dominican Republic beachfront villa he owns. At the time, Rangel said he would eventually disclose his tax returns, but has not yet done so.

The turn of the calendar to 2010 will mark the beginning of the end for about one-third of the members of the Missouri General Assembly.

Term-limits will prohibit 52 of Missouri’s 163 House members and 10 of its 34 senators from seeking re-election in November 2010. Several more will voluntary forgo a shot at serving another term. Some will instead pursue different public offices.

The upcoming election will mark the second largest turnover since Missouri voters passed a 1992 law limiting politicians to eight years each in the House and Senate.

Less hysterical but no less disappointed was former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, who wrote in the Washington Post Thursday that “Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform.”

When finding themselves on the opposing side of the president’s policy, his former admirers on the left are discovering something that the right has known for a while now: Obama will look you in the eye and lie. When the president said last week that “every health care economist out there” agrees that the reform package includes “whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve,” it wasn’t just free marketeers who cried foul. “You know it is a lie,” thundered health care writer Jon Walker at the popular progressive Web site FireDogLake. “The PhRMA lobbyists you cut the secret deal they know it is a lie, health care reform experts know it is a lie, and the American people should know it is a lie.”

For those of us who don’t necessarily take their policy cues from Ralph Nader or FireDogLake, it’s tempting to just sit back and laugh at the festival of left-on-left recriminations. These guys are like Elin Nordegren with a golf club, swinging away at yet another betrayal.

Alinsky Nation.

Leftwing political payback

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"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." — Cicero, 106 BC-43 BC